Meg Pokrass ~ Others Of Similar Dimension

Sitting beside a suf­fer­ing, hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing zebra (real­ly a horse with stripes) was not new to the women in my fam­i­ly. My moth­er had expe­ri­enced it, as had my grand­moth­er and my grand­moth­er’s grand­moth­er. Now it was my turn

For every pot there is a lid,” my moth­er said before she died. Nobody knew why she said it or why only females cried.

Here it was again, a life and death moment in the ani­mal king­dom call­ing for human com­pas­sion. In many ways this expe­ri­ence would be no dif­fer­ent than fish­ing for com­pli­ments from a bored hus­band on weekends.

The first time is always the hard­est. I could not stop tak­ing pic­tures with my i‑phone of the baby fake-horse —  slosh­ing around as though play­ing in a small heart-shaped plas­tic pool. Lazy. There she was: bold stripes fac­ing up, stripes under­lin­ing her upturned nose —  too adorable for most peo­ple’s tastes. A fake horse like her moth­er at best.

I pre­pared my fists, two of them… rolling up my lacy sleeves and fold­ed fin­gers ready for emer­gency triage, the kind need­ed for the birth of camels, rhi­nos, zebras (hors­es with stripes), gazelles, oth­ers of sim­i­lar dimen­sion and need.

~

Meg Pokrass. For one of my five bosses.